"Plans for a way to tap copper, nickel and other precious metals in an environmentally sensitive area that runs close to the prized Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) have been a decade in the making. Environmentalists have resisted the project at every turn, while others have said the project could spark an economic renaissance in the job-starved Babbit-Hoyt Lakes area north of Duluth."

And besides plans, snakes abound in northern Minnesota mining zones; where if not willing to take my word for it ask a metro area DFL legislator of the progressive stripe.

They will might tell you about what struck from out of the grass.

This link, on Polymet's inexorable march to environmental risk/reward balancing where one snake on one pan tipped the balance. Not the only snake, yet the heaviest one.

The headline quote is from early in the item, whereas later:

Conservation watchdog groups and Minnesota Indian tribes have raised alarms about the project’s potential effects on the delicate ecosystem that stretches up to the BWCA. Aaron Klemz, spokesman for the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, said the group would comment on the report later this week.

PolyMet projects that the copper-nickel mine will create [a mere] 360 permanent local jobs, and hundreds more indirectly. The company estimates it will produce $80 million annually in federal, state and local taxes.

And of that plethora cornucopia of projected tax money, reform next legislative session may keep all but a tiny trickle of it from going as in past times into the IRRRB slush fund, to be used against environmental wisdom in multiple established ways which ring offensive to many.

Who, among readers, would call a stinking handful of jobs - 350, half a job for each of the potential years the prokect on ending might pollute - an "economic renaissance?" Who besides a Range shill? And trust me, we do have shills, if nothing else, in a plethora.